“Oum!” Siri said.
She looked at him for a second or two before coming round.
“Comrade Siri. Comrade Phosy. Thank heaven.”
“What’s wrong?” Phosy asked.
“A new history lesson. I’m comatose.”
New history was one of the subjects inflicted on schools by the Department of Education, along with Russian and Marxist-Leninist theory. It intimated that life on earth had begun in the caves of Huaphan, where the Pathet Lao had orchestrated its takeover. Whereas in old history, centuries of Lao royal heritage and world events had taken center stage, new history seemed to suggest that fifty years was an inordinately long time, and that the West was a small outer suburb of Vientiane—a place no self-respecting person would want to venture into on a dark night.
“But you’re a chemistry teacher,” Siri reminded her.
“I was, Doctor. I was. And I shall be again on Thursday. But we’re all being encouraged to diversify.” She glanced at Phosy, whose politics she wasn’t completely sure about. One had to be careful in this day and age. “It’s a marvelous system. I teach physical education on Mondays. Can you believe it? The pupils saw me in shorts for the first time last week and half of them have been off sick since.”
“What do you know about new history?” Siri asked.
“Don’t need to know anything,” she said and held up a thick ring binder crammed to bursting with notes. “It’s all here. I just write today’s lesson on the blackboard and the kids copy it.”
“And today’s lesson was … ?”
“The great victory at Sala Phou Khoun.”
“Is that so? I was there, you know. It wasn’t that great,” Siri told her. “If I’d realized, I could have come earlier and given your class a few insights.”
“Sorry,” she said, as she led them to a bench on the school grounds. “We aren’t allowed to stray from the curriculum. Each class has a spy—sorry, I mean a monitor—who reports back to the school political officer. The kids aren’t even allowed to ask questions. But that’s just as well, considering I don’t have any answers.”
She plonked herself down on the bench as if the lesson had doubled her weight. “Now, what can I do for Vientiane’s two most eligible bachelors? You know I don’t have any chemicals. They’re still stuck at customs. I hear the Department of Interior people have been sniffing them to see if they’re hallucinatory.”
Siri and Phosy sat on either side of her. Siri took out the blind man’s note.
“In fact, it’s your English we’re after,” he said.
Oum had been in the middle of her postgraduate study in Australia when the communists took over Laos. Her time in Sydney had been marked by two incredibly bad decisions. The first was to let herself be impregnated by a ginger-haired Aussie lad who skipped town shortly after. This error of judgment led to the birth of Nali, one of a very limited edition of redheaded Lao babies. The other bad decision was to cut short her studies and return to her homeland. The authorities had hounded her from the moment she arrived at Wattay Airport. Certainly she had to be a spy. With tens of thousands of people heading out of the country, why else would she want to go against the flow? And, to make matters worse, she spoke English—a decadent Western tool created to spread propaganda and lies. Teacher Oum was a marked woman.
“I’d be delighted,” she said and took the paper from Siri. She perused the list.
“What does it say?” Phosy asked.
“Haven’t got a clue. It’s not English,” she said. “But you knew that, didn’t you, Doctor? You aren’t here because of my language skills.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Siri, you know as well as I do that this list is written in code. It could just as well be French or any other language that uses the Roman script. You’re here to see whether I can crack it. You think I’m a spy, too.”
“I don’t think any such thing. I just know you have a very advanced scientific mind that could probably make short work of such a simple puzzle as this. Your being a spy is irrelevant.”
“Siri, I am not …”
“I’m sorry. Could you just take a look at it for us?”
Reluctantly, Oum copied the note out on the back of one of her history sheets. It looked unfathomable:
22
xesaaghu iaik bnki qhb
oo ykjbeniaz bkn 24li
jk kxf bnki ll
jas lhwuano
x26a/ywxo ykjbeniaz
x28a/iwoo ykjbeniaz iwzx ykjbeniaz
x24oa/cjgl ykjbeniaz
x28o/cjol qjzayezaz
ywgg ykjbeniaz
ywlg ykjbeniaz
x30o/ykzg qjzayezaz
x32o/iwog ykjbeniaz iwgg ykjbeniaz
z zwu lnklkoaz wqc52
nalhu zenayp
pda zareh’o rwcejw
“I’ll take a look at it tonight,” she said, still obviously miffed that Siri thought she was a spy. “But I can’t promise anything. I don’t have any formal training in this kind of thing.”
“Oum, dear,” Siri smiled, “if you can turn your mind to history and physical education, I’m sure this will present you no difficulty at all.”
* * *
Dong Bang was twenty miles from Vientiane. If the road had been better, Siri’s old Triumph motorcycle would have made the trip in twenty minutes. As it turned out, it took them almost twice that. Phosy’s knuckles were welded together in front of Siri’s chest when finally they arrived at the little wooden pavilion where the long-distance bus picked up and dropped off passengers. Like most other places in Laos this year, the little village wore sixteen shades of brown dust. Two small wooden houses with shops out front abutted the road but there were no people to be seen. A pair of dogs slept in the shade of the bus shelter, growling at each other in their dreams.
Siri and Phosy had been to the morning market bus station in Vientiane and asked around about the blind man. People had to have noticed him. It hadn’t been long before they were directed to the Dong Bang—Ban Nathe service. The country bus had sat idling like a big duck in a nest of exhaust smog. They talked with the driver. It wasn’t he who’d brought the blind man into town the previous day, but this fellow had done so on two, perhaps three, other occasions. The most recent he could recall was about two weeks earlier. The driver remembered the old blind man waiting in the Dong Bang pavilion with a woman. She’d waved down the bus and handed the money to the driver. She never traveled with the blind man and didn’t meet him on his return. Once the bus reached the morning market, the blind man climbed down with everyone else and crossed the road to the Bureau de Poste. He’d be back on the bus in time for the return journey.
So this wasn’t the blind man’s first trip and the note was probably not the first he’d collected at the post office. Thus, with nothing better to do, Siri and Phosy had taken a ride to Dong Bang. All they needed was to find the blind man’s house and break the news to his family. But it was no longer just an exercise, a matter of filling in the details on the death certificate and closing their respective case files. They had a mystery on their hands. Who would send notes to a blind man, and why would they go to the trouble of writing them in invisible ink and in code? Neither Siri nor Phosy could resist such a conundrum.
They left the motorcycle behind the pavilion and walked to the nearest open-front shop. It was a noodle restaurant and wholesale compost outlet. Hoes and spades homemade from slices of war shrapnel were also for sale. The chef-cumshopkeeper was sprawled on a hammock strung between the two beams holding up the roof of the store. When Siri coughed, she opened her eyes reluctantly and seemed disappointed to have customers.
“Yes, my loves?”
“We’re trying to find the home of a blind man we believe lives here,” Phosy said. “His name’s Bounthan.”
“No, dearie,” she said. “There’s only the one blind chap here and that’s Dr. Buagaew.”
Siri and Phosy looked at each other. Phosy said, “Doctor Buagaew? A physi
cian?”
The woman scratched between her breasts. “No. In fact, he’s a dentist. We all just call him ‘Doctor.’ “
“But he’s blind,” Phosy exclaimed.
“He wasn’t always, love,” she replied, now scratching her big backside through the thick canvas hammock. “He was a damned good dentist till the cataracts got him. People used to come from all around these parts to have Dr. Buagaew fix their teeth. The worse his sight got, of course, the more mistakes he started to make, until he couldn’t do it no more.
People said they didn’t mind that he was blind; it was still better than going all the way to Vientiane. But he felt bad about pulling out the wrong teeth and that. Changed his character completely, it did. It was a bit like he turned reclusive. Stopped talking to everyone.”
“How did he make a living once he went blind?” Siri asked.
“No idea, love. Best ask him, eh? He lives across the way. It’s the only two-story place in the village. Can’t miss it.”
Siri and Phosy crossed the quiet main street and headed in the direction she’d indicated. Obviously, news of Dr. Buagaew’s demise hadn’t reached the village. This was the part of his job Dr. Siri hated: informing the next of kin. But, as it turned out, the white-haired, chopstick-thin wife of the blind dentist already knew she was a widow. When her husband hadn’t come back on the returning bus, or on the subsequent one, she’d become concerned. She’d headed into the city to look for him. She’d learned about the accident from the pen sellers in front of the post office. She told her visitors it was a very sad thing but there seemed to be little feeling in her words. The three of them were sitting on pieces of a tightly woven rattan lounge suite in a well-furnished living room. A large brass fan circled overhead. The doctor and his wife obviously hadn’t fallen on hard times since his retirement.
“We were wondering why you hadn’t come to claim the body,” Siri said.
“Nobody knew where he’d been taken,” she replied. Her voice was slight, almost inaudible beneath the whir of the fan. Her skin was dark and rutted like ripples on a night pond. She hadn’t offered her visitors a drink.
“But the morgue would have been the logical place to look,” Siri continued. Normally, he wouldn’t have pursued the point with a bereaved wife but there was something about her demeanor that suggested she wasn’t particularly heartbroken.
“I suppose so,” she said. “I don’t really know about things like that.”
“About cremations and burial ceremonies, you mean?”
“About the rules of death in a socialist state. I assumed the government would take care of everything. I’m a bit of a novice when it comes to communism, I’m afraid. I just know the new system is very efficient. Well, yes, look. You two are here already.”
Neither man was of a mind to refute that observation, and neither wanted to point out the rarity of the service they were performing.
“Comrade,” Phosy said, “perhaps you could help us clear up a little mystery.”
“I’ll do my best, of course.”
He took the folded note from his shirt pocket and handed it to Dr. Buagaew’s wife. “We were wondering what this is. Your husband apparently collected it at the post office before he was killed.”
Siri observed that she didn’t flinch or change her expression when she took the paper from Phosy. He wondered whether she had any muscles at all in her face. She took a long time to read down the list, then she looked up at Phosy. To Siri’s surprise, she managed a smile of sorts.
“Why, it’s nothing at all,” she said.
“We were just curious,” Siri told her. “We made a sort of bet as to what it might be.”
She looked from one man to the other as if attempting to weigh their collective intelligence. Finally, she pointed her chin at a small antique table behind their seat. Siri had noticed it when they first entered. On it lay a fine wooden chessboard whose expensive jade pieces were poised mid-battle.
“Do you know what that is, gentlemen?” she asked. Siri was about to reply but she didn’t wait for a response. Her assessment had obviously classified the men as unworldly. “It’s an old-fashioned game called chess. It’s very complicated. My husband did try to teach it to me once but I have no head for such trivial complications. Dr. Buagaew loved the game but he didn’t have anyone to play with in this rustic place. So, for a number of years, he maintained a long-distance chess-playing relationship with an old friend of his from school. He lives in the south. I believe there are players in other places, too, but I can’t give you the details. They play via the mail service.”
“So, these symbols … ?”
“… are a record of their moves. Had Dr. Buagaew survived, he would have brought me this list and instructed me to read it to him as he sat at the table there.”
“You know the English alphabet?” Phosy asked.
“A little. My husband, on the other hand, was quite fluent in English.”
“And once you read out his friend’s code, Dr. Buagaew would understand and make the moves on this board?” Siri continued.
“And study the pieces with his fingers. It’s one of the few tactile games a blind man can enjoy. Once he had his own move worked out, he’d read the code to me and I’d write back to his friend.”
“You also wrote in invisible ink?” Phosy asked.
“Invisible ink? Heavens no. Why should I do such a thing?”
“Because this note was originally unreadable. It was written with a special solution that needed to be treated to make it legible.”
“Oh, my. That sounds like another of my husband’s friend’s little tricks. He often played games like that to amuse the doctor. I remember one time he wrote all the characters in reverse. Another time he wrote in Chinese. I was up all night with the Chinese dictionary trying to work it out.”
“He sounds like a real card.”
“I think perhaps he was just trying to cheer up Buagaew after he lost his sight.”
“But usually they wrote in Roman script?”
“Yes.”
“Any idea why?”
“My husband and his friend both learned the game—chess, that is—from a British Quaker missionary when they were teenagers. So it was the natural medium in which to exchange information when they played.”
Phosy’s interrogation seemed to have dried up. He appeared satisfied with the woman’s explanations, but Siri had one more question of his own.
“Why did he insist on making the arduous trip into the city by himself? I mean, it would have been easier for you to go and pick up the letters.”
“Doctor, in your career you must have come across numerous men who have become disabled as a result of the wars. It’s a question of pride for them to remain independent in spite of their afflictions. To the end, my husband insisted he could do everything without my help. Perhaps what happened yesterday finally proved him wrong.”
Back at the bus shelter, Siri’s motorcycle had attracted a coating of red ants. Phosy slapped away at them absent mindedly with his cap.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Well, I’d say we can be certain of two things,” Siri told him. “One, that Dr. Buagaew’s wife didn’t love her husband, and two, that the dentist was lying to her through his teeth.”
His thoughts were interrupted by an agonizing scream from his friend. While Phosy had been launching his frontal attack on the ants, a rear-guard unit had worked its way up his trouser leg and its troops were devouring him from the thigh up. It’s hard to hold a serious debriefing with a man who’s ripping off his pants in the middle of a town’s main street.
You’re Only Dead Once
It was somewhere between 2 and 3 a.m., and only Dtui, Siri, and Phosy still remained beneath the canopy of dark leaves in the temple yard. Twice, the abbot had risen, bleary-eyed, to remind them that his monks had to be up at five to collect alms, so could they keep the noise down? Twice, the mourners had apologized and continued their anecdotes
in respectful whispers. But large quantities of rice whisky tend to play havoc with a body’s volume control. It didn’t take long before they were laughing and singing and shouting messages to Manoluk, who lay shrouded in cloves and tobacco leaves in the prayer chamber just behind them. You’re only dead once, and the guests wanted this to be a good send-off for their old friend.
The last of the other mourners had staggered home before 1 a.m. and, although they were exhausted, the three comrades felt obliged to maintain a vigil. They were huddled together around the last inch of an orange candle. There was no breeze to disturb the flame or cool the sticky night.
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, Doc?” Dtui said through lips she couldn’t quite feel. Rice whisky doesn’t numb, it anesthetizes.
“Tell you what?”
“If she comes to see you.”
“Manoluk? Don’t be silly. The spirits only contact me if they’re restless. What’s your ma got to be unhappy about?”
“Well, the fact that she’s dead,” Phosy suggested.
When you’re drinking with a corpse, there’s no such thing as irreverence. Comments like that had them all rocking with laughter. They heard a loud cough from the abbot’s hut.
“All right,” Siri whispered. “I concede she might not be too delighted about being dead, but she certainly has no grievances about the way Dtui looked after her all those years. No mother could ask for more love and dedication from a daughter.”
They toasted to Dtui.
“Well, just in case she does,” Dtui said, “even if it’s to say hello and tell you what her new teak house in Nirvana’s like. You’d let me know, eh?”
“I promise.”
Phosy staggered off to water the gooseberry bush beyond the temple gates. There was a blissful silence, which in Laos can incorporate a lot of noise. There’s the humming and buzzing of insects and the distant howling of dogs. Somewhere a wind chime is disturbed by a lizard. House timbers stretch and groan. Water drips from a leaky tap into the huge stone temple pot. But, as any Lao would tell you, these are just musical accompaniments to make silence more interesting.
Anarchy and Old Dogs Page 3
